Feature Articles

“One of the questions that came up in an interview yesterday was ‘what’s the coolest piece of software you use?’ My immediate answer was Aquamacs (Mac), a text editor based on emacs (a Unix editor) but with a more intuitive interface added.”

Aquamacs is a user-friendly build of the powerful Emacs text
editor. Aquamacs integrates with the Mac and offers the same
comforts that any application on the Mac provides. Yet, it comes
with all the ergonomy and extensibility you've come to expect from
GNU Emacs. It's beeen adapted by David
Reitter, based on GNU Emacs by Richard Stallman and many
others.

Aquamacs has been available for about a decade and
is used daily by thousands of academics, programmers, and
authors. It is backed by two strong communities: Aquamacs users,
and Emacs enthusiasts on all computing platforms (GNU/Linux/Unix,
Windows, Mac).

What's Emacs? Emacsis a text editor of legendary power and
configurability, but it also has an enormously complex user
interface. One advantage of it is: no matter what operating
system you run Emacs on, you'll always get the same interface.
The big challenge: if you use a number of applications on your
Mac, one of them is Emacs, you'll have to switch gears when you
switch to Emacs.

Aquamacs is better. We support the standard Mac user
interface that you've come to love. For instance, in addition
to traditional Emacs shortcuts like C-x C-f (open a new file),
Aquamacs understands Command-O. Aquamacs behaves like a modern
application on Mac (or Windows) when it comes to selecting,
copying, pasting texts within Aquamacs or in between
applications. Aquamacs offers nice, smooth fonts. Asian input
methods work. It's easy to install and runs out-of-the box with
no configuration. And all is built on GNU Emacs, so you can use
your favorite Emacs packages! Check the Features section if you want to know
more.

Who made it? Aquamacs has been adapted from GNU Emacs by David
Reitter, aided by enthusiastic users and Emacs
experts. Collaborator Nathaniel Cunningham has contributed
features such as native spell-checking and window tabs.
Project co-founder Kevin Walzer has contributed
easy-to-understand manuals. There is a long list of contributors,
including those who wrote included packages and, of course,
Emacs.
GNU Emacs has a long history that
began some fourty years ago, primarily driven by the efforts of
GNU founder Richard M. Stallman. GNU Emacs has first been ported
to the Mac by Andrew Choi; the Cocoa port was written by Adrian
Robert and colleagues; much Mac development of Emacs was done by
Yamamoto Mitsuharu.